This is actually a rather interesting question because of second- and third-order effects. Most people will tell you that a Coursera certificate is useless for

This is actually a rather interesting question because of second- and third-order effects. Most people will tell you that a Coursera certificate is useless for getting a job, yet the folks at interviewing.io found it was very strongly correlated with interview performance [1]: "For people who attended top schools, completing Udacity or Coursera courses didn’t appear to matter. However, for people who did not, the effect was huge, so huge, in fact, that it dominated the board. Moreover, interviewees who attended top schools performed significantly worse than interviewees who had not attended top schools but HAD taken a Udacity or Coursera course" Why are recruiters ignoring such a strong signal? My guess is that most people recognize how easy it is to cheat a Coursera course, so it is generally not considered valuable by recruiters. Therefore most job-seekers do not place any value on a certificate, so they will not be bothered to try to cheat to get one. So the only people remaining who complete the course are those that are doing it because they enjoy the subject matter, which is clearly associated with passing the interview. There is therefore a perverse feedback loop where any recognition of the high value of the course leads to cheating which causes it to become worthless (this reminds me a little of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle). [1] http://blog.interviewing.io/lessons-from-3000-technical-interviews/ http://blog.interviewing.io/lessons-from-3000-technical-inte...